Roger Gordon has been a Professor of Economics at UCSD since 2000 and an Adjunct Professor at the Cheung Kong School of Business since 2010. Prior to then, he taught at the University of Michigan and Princeton University, and had been a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories. He has also been a Visiting Professor at a wide variety of universities and institutions throughout the world.

He is a past Editor of the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Public Economics and The American Economic Review, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT and a Dr. oec. h.c. from the University of St. Gallen. His research covers a wide variety of topics in public finance.